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Now that I’ve received the first copies of my 21st novel, Triggers, I am delighted to realize that I have published two million words of science fiction in my career.

More than that — and here’s a claim very few authors can make — all two million words of it are still in print.

My early novels were shorter than my more recent ones. My first, Golden Fleece, published in 1990, was under 60,000 words; later books — including my Hugo Award-winning Hominids, my John W. Campbell Memorial Award-winning Mindscan, and my Aurora Award-winning Wake — were each 100,000 words. Rounding me up to the 2,000,000-word mark are the 180,000 words of short fiction I’ve published, which is collected in two beautiful matching volumes, Iterations and Other Stories and Identity Theft and Other Stories.

It astonishes me to think that I’ve even typed that number of words (it’s about 8,000 manuscript pages). But I’m very glad I did, and I’m super-grateful to all my readers who have been with me on this long, wonderful journey.

2 Responses to Two million words of science fiction

That’s pretty astonishing. You’ve hit a lot of milestones that most writers never will. 2mil published words. An adaptation of one of your books to TV. Being known as “Canada’s Greatest SF Writer.” And so on.